This week: • TWOT™ sandwich • Canucks crack • Zarqawi •
• Haditha • Timor • Spinoza • Stuff •

 

The little red email would like to apologise for the lengthy hiatus — which is mostly due to the team having insane day-job schedules that colluded against us for the last few weeks. Service should be back to “normal” — whatever that is.

 

Chicago threatened?!: take a big bite!

Sears Tower: Smears Tower. What a load of baloney this latest terror deception has been. Following hot on the heels from the botched UK raid where a pair of Muslims were falsely arrested in a mammoth operation only to be released a week later, you’d think the White House might have given some waiting space before this BS attempt to keep the American public fearful and justify the ‘new Cold War’ that is The War On Terror™ (TWOT™). The Sears Tower ‘plot’comes at a time when some Democrats are finally finding their cajonas and calling for a pull out in Iraq.

Obviously wary of their potential drop in rent revenues the owners of Sears Tower said they felt their buildingh ad never been under threat.

And what of the ‘Muslim’ make up of the apprehended? A spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations said on CNN that the Miami cult members just arrested are not Muslims. It seems pretty obvious that they are just a local African-American cult which mixed Judaism, Christianity and (a little bit of) Islam. It seems to be a bit of a vague offshoot of the Moors group founded by Dwight York. Now CNN is saying one member said they practiced witchcraft [likely meaning Haitian voodoo or perhaps Santeria-like rituals]. One former member is called Levi-El, suggestinghe might be associated with the Black Hebrew movement or an offshoot. A relative of one of the members, Phanor, said that they wore black uniforms with a star of David arm patch and considered themselves of the Order of Melchizadek, a Seas of David group, primarily studying the Bible. The mother of one insisted that he is a Catholic. Then there is all that Jewish symbology and terminology, even in their names. Islam was nothing more for them but a set of symbols they could pull into their syncretic local culture. The group drew on poor Haitian immigrants and local indigent African-American youth. If this were the 1960s, they’d have been Black Panthers or Communists. In 21st century America, they can be anything the White House and the media want them to be. Patsies for the terror cause.

• Watch a CNN video on how the Sears Towers ‘terrorists’ were set up.

 

 

Canadians fall for TWOT™ ruse

Three weeks prior to the Sears Tower ‘plot’ Canada had its own brush with ‘terror’ — the two tales are remarkably similar and point to a sad decline in the Maple Leaf nation’s normal liberal, non-US aligned stance.

For the past three weeks Canadians have been subjected to a non-stop barrage of inflammatory media coverage arising from the arrest of seventeen alleged terrorists on June 2 and 3.

Sensationalist headlines, in poster-size type, have greeted newspaper readers: “STORM Parliament Hill, SEIZE the politicians, BEHEAD the Prime Minister (the Globe and Mail); “Jihadist generation” (the Toronto Star); “The Jihadis among us” (the National Post.)

Rather than critically examining the claims of the police, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and the Conservative government concerning the alleged terrorist conspiracy, the corporate media has greatly amplified and embellished them. Above all, the media has trumpeted the official claim that only the prompt action of security forces prevented one or more terrorist atrocity.

Meanwhile, facts that call into question the police-government claims — for example, that some of the alleged terrorists contracted to buy fertilizer, which can be used in the making of bombs, from police operatives — have been virtually buried; and manifest abuses of police-state power, such as mobilizing machine-gun touting police and manacling the accused for their court appearances, have been presented by the media as further indices of just how menacing the terror plot was.

Nevertheless, cracks have begun to appear in the official story that the 17 were poised to carry out a major terrorist attack. For one thing, the alleged terrorist plotters, a group comprised almost entirely of young men and boys, had repeatedly done things that drew attention to themselves, such as trespassing on a farm for several days last December so as to conduct war-games.

One thing was common to all mainstream attempts to buttress the police-government claims that Canadians had been at grave risk. They omitted any mention of two crucial facts: CSIS and the RCMP had had the alleged terrorists under blanket surveillance for months if not years; police-intelligence sources concede that they long had sufficient evidence to arrest some if not all of the alleged terrorists, but, with the government’s approval, chose not to do so.

As the World Socialist Web Site has previously explained, the “smashing of the Toronto terrorist plot” occurred at a time dictated by the police and government, and was clearly contrived to boost the authority of CSIS and RCMP and support the Conservatives’ contention that Canada must change its policies in accordance with it being a frontline state in the “war on terror.”

The media has sought to stoke fear and panic in a patent attempt to stampede the populace behind the Conservative government’s right-wing agenda, especially the expanded Canadian Armed Forces’ role in Afghanistan, its push for closer relations with the Bush administration, and plans to expand the police-security apparatus, including surveillance of the internet, in the name of fighting “home-grown terrorism.”

This campaign has had some impact. A Globe and Mail/CTV News poll taken on June 14 found that 48 percent of Canadians support the CAF intervention in Afghanistan, while 44 percent oppose. This is a major shift from a poll earlier this month, which showed the opposition to the intervention outweighed support for it by 14 percentage points.

There is one further aspect of the press coverage of the alleged Toronto terror plot that merits consideration — the large number of establishment voices that are suggesting Muslims are collectively responsible for the alleged terror conspiracy and the linked calls for Canada to reconsider its immigration and multiculturalism policies and notions of citizenship.

All in all, it’s not too difficult to join the dots between the controversial stated goals of the Canadian right wing administration and the ‘Toronto terror tirade’.

 

 

Zarqawi the double agent

The media deception reached fever pitch towards the end of May with the assassination of the so called enemy number one, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a man whose very existence was part of an elaborate plot by the White House to tie Al Qaeda with Iraq in February 2003 to usher in war. Prior to Colin Powell championing him at the UN, Zarqawi was a nobody; he couldn’t even load a gun, was hardly ever mentioned until war came and suddenly found himself as evil incarnate in order for the US to falsely prosecute the case for war — his rise was also a tacit admission that another baddie was needed since Osama was simply not doing it in the bad guy polls in the US. Zarqawi’s actual relationship with Al Qaeda at the time: zilch, something Robert Fisk of the Independent muses upon, writing: “What a sigh of relief there must have been in Washington that Zarqawi was dead and not captured. He might have told the truth.”

When it was found that Zarqawi had managed to survive the two 500 pound bombs that pounded his residence, word from on high swiftly came in to 100% make sure that he did not leave the premises alive, hence the reports, even broadcast on CBS and AP, about a neighbour seeing American troops giving the wounded Zarqawi a darn good kicking to ensure he died. Initially, the military had said Zarqawi was killed outright. But two days later, the spokesman for the US-led forces in Iraq backtracked and said Iraqi forces found Zarqawi clinging to life. Little or no mention has been made of the three women who died in the air strikes — collateral damage just doesn’t sell newspapers any more.

Zarqawi was a creation of Western propagandists. He came a long way over the past three years. Until January 2003 he was a mysterious figure, described by the CIA as a “lone wolf.”

As Loretta Napoleoni, author of Insurgent Iraq: al-Zarqawi and the New Generation, has argued, Zarqawi turned America’s myth into a reality: “From a small-town bully, to a small-fry jihadist, to the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, he fully exploited the legend woven around his person. While back in February 2003 he was an insignificant jihadist, [by 2005 he had become] the undisputed most-wanted terror leader.”

Zarqawi’s terror campaign was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 2003, US politicians handpicked this insignificant jihadist and labelled him a terror leader — and sure enough, he later became a terror leader. Terror on tap.

His capture, the media circus surrounding the event, and the subsequent backtracking by the military on his condition smacks of the BS surrounding the snatching of Saddam in his little hideaway a couple of years ago, where it emerged it was all totally staged for the camera.

According to Raw Story, the hunt for Zarqawi had been underway for a long time with its recent success only disclosed, of course, way after the fact.

“According to military and intelligence sources, five of Zarqawi’s men were picked up in early May by an already ongoing effort by an elite US special ops force, known by some as Gray Fox and by others as Task Force 145, which had been scouring Iraq for Zarqawi since the insurgency began.”

So they may have known where he was in early May. But rather then reeling him in then, they waited for a more opportune moment in order to maximize the impact.

And what a time to suddenly play the Zarqawi card — just as the whole nation and the media are slamming the White House and the military for the horrors committed by American troops at Haditha (see next story). Operation Media Deception played to a tee, Haditha wiped off the map just as similar atrocities disappeared from the public’s view when Saddam was snatched.

Finally lest we forget, Zarqawi and his terrorism were a consequence of the illegal invasion of Iraq. As were the 1,400 deaths by violent means recorded in May 2006 by Baghdad’s central morgue alone. As were the numerous atrocities committed by the US military, the names of which are engraved for ever in history: Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Tal Afar, Haditha and many more.

 

 

Shock and awe at Haditha

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the media reaction to the massacre of 24 innocent civilians at Haditha in Iraq is the shocked, surprised tone of the commentary as if this is a first. Has the collective mainstream such a fickle, short term memory that they do not remember the countless incidents of carnage taking place each and every day inside Iraq at the hands of us good ol’ Allies? Was Falluja not pulverized, like Mosul before it? And now, two weeks on from the frothy media reaction to Haditha, the horror has just disappeared.

Not only did US and UK troops start this a long ago, with random, indiscriminate killings commonplace; these killings are an inevitable result of invasion. The foreign troops are heavily armed and wildly unpopular. They are trained and paid to be agressive killers. They have very little understanding of Iraqi society and culture, and they can’t speak, read or understand the language. There are no legal consequences for indiscriminate killings unless the press get to hear of them, and even then they are light. Indeed it seems that the worst offence a US or UK soldier can be guilty of is being off-message. Kill almost anyone and you can pretend they are an insurgent, or they didn’t stop or they didn’t do exactly what you told them (in English) to do. And the troops come from a paranoid, risk averse, anti-arab culture and political system that would rather 10 innocent Iraqis died than risk the life of a US or UK soldier and trains them that way.

Specialist Jody Casey, a scout sniper in Baquba who witnessed civilians being killed by soldiers, said recently bombs “go off and you just zap any farmer that is close to you”. Soldiers were told to carry shovels in vehicles so they could plant them on civilian victims, he said, to make it look like they were digging to set up roadside bombs. Specialist Michael Blake, who served in Balad, said it was common practice to “shoot up the landscape or anything that moved” after an explosion.

As the Guardian noted, “The indiscriminate harming of Iraqis has, in practice, been the modus operandi of US-led policy towards Iraq since 1990. There is a continuity between this bloody occupation and the indiscriminate 13 years of US-led sanctions that preceded it — which also killed thousands of Iraqis.”

“There are many, many, many cases like Haditha that are still undercover and need to be highlighted in Iraq,” Dr Salam Ishmael, projects manager with the organisation Doctors for Iraq, and former chief of the junior doctors in Baghdad’s Medical City Hospital told IPS. He was present at Haditha for the American bloodbath.

In Haditha itself, he said, the US military cut electricity and water to the entire city, attacked the hospital and burned the pharmacy.

“The hospital has been attacked three times. In November 2005 the hospital was occupied by the American and Iraqi Army for seven days, which is a severe breach of the Geneva Conventions,” he said.

“In one of these attacks, the US soldiers used live ammunition inside the hospital. They handcuffed all the doctors and destroyed the entire contents of the medical storage. It ended with the killing of one of the patients in his bed.”

The Iraqi Red Crescent reported at the time that nearly 1,000 families had been forced to flee their homes in Haditha following the launch of the US-led military operation.

Joseph Hatcher served in the western Iraqi town of Dawr from February 2004 until March last year. He said his cultural training before deployment consisted of a three-hour class and a pamphlet he was given.

“It’s just here’s where you are on a map, because you’d be surprised how many people don’t know that,” Hatcher told IPS. “The only language training we received was a hand-out flip book type flyer which was how to say things like ‘go down on your hands and knees’ and ‘don’t resist’. We didn’t learn how to make any kind of conversation.”

Salam al-Amidi worked as translator for the US military in the northern city of Mosul, which has been controlled by insurgents for over a year. He said he was the only translator for more than 5,000 US troops.

He said the US military relies mostly on paid informants in deciding which houses to raid.

“Maybe that person wanted revenge on that family and came and told us that he saw someone selling weapons. We would just go to that house at three in the morning, we’d break the door, and break everything in the house.”

The Washington Post reported a fortnight back that Marines went to the home of a 52-year-old disabled Iraqi, took him outside and shot him four times in the face. Shows of brutal force in front of a paralyzed being — a neat metaphor for American occupation of Iraq.

 

 

Australia behind Timorese unrest?

We were despondent to see East Timor plunge into crisis — the birth of the nation having brought so much joy so recently. We did initially think that it was another sad case of a fractious southeast Asian country at loggerheads with each other. Then, we started looking into it and found that weasel John Howard and his Australian government were more than a little responsible for the plight that the Timorese now found themselves in. The images of Aussie soldiers on the ground, helping out are misleading. Australia is adamant that East Timor will essentially be a vassal, gifting vast resources down under.

When East Timor’s Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri refused to back-down from his nationalist economy development plan, Australia prepared for his removal.

Australia wants to dominate the economic development of East Timor gas and oil reserves. Without the resistance and skills of Alkatiri, East Timor’s natural resources would have been the property of Australian-American oil Corporations.

Alkatiri who is trained economist in Mozambique refused to budge and continued to develop an independent economy for the people of East Timor despite pressure from Australia.

As a result, he has been demonised and accused of being a “dictator” and an “Angolan Marxist” by Timorese quislings and Australian politicians. In reality, Alkatiri is a Muslim steering East Timor on the same path of development — although at a slow pace — as Hugo Chavez steering Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the Australian Government of John Howard and the Australian media — controlled mostly by the government and Rupert Murdoch — continue to promote East Timor President Xanana Gusmao as the saviour of East Timor. Indeed, despite the relatively minor acts of violence in East Timor, the Australian Government and the media overstated and amplified the violence. The aim has been to create a situation to justify Australian military intervention.

 

 

Spinoza gets sexy

A few notes on the unbearable lightness of being

The American Family Association is unintentionally a resource for finding quality soft laddie porn: for its organization A Million Dads has its pantyhose in a tangle about an ad by Mitchum which leads off with a Flashy animation. Three hot girls appear with music and “if the only French words you know are ‘menage a trois’, then you are a Mitchum man”. There are also links to the Gay Games.

This subethical world, in which a noun triggers associations against the unmanageable will, is familiar to me; for I grew up a ghettoized Catholic in a community haunted with memories of Croatia during the war, and word from the Nuns was that you need not, you better not, explore the subconscious and its verbs, lest the nouns, the key words, be “suggestive”.

Sure, it’s in some sense “unhealthy” to stare at laddie porn in some sense. Let’s see, one instead should marry some clueless woman and together explore what could be heaven or what could be hell.

You will search this column in vain for a healthy view of sexuality from your unclassifiable and transgressive author, so don’t start with me… you know how I get.

I will say that a great and good man, a friend, who has like a trueblue American Dad raised two fine daughters, took them to the Gay Parade in his community because his daughters when little were amused by men who, unlike most men they saw on the street, were all happy and indeed Gay in more than one sense of this portmanteau word. There are of course no ill effects.

But at the same time we’re all screwed up. My prolix pal Derrida in fact explored this in an unreadable book, which I manfully read, Of Grammatology. Woe of course to any unsuspecting yokel who in the East Jesus Borders paws through this book for enlightenment (aufklarung) on how to talk right: for much of it concerns the fact that our thinking on sexuality in general, and “jerking off” in particular, is all the way down screwy in the sense that our language does not permit us to think “rationally” about it.

Poor Rousseau, despite his Grey Eminence as a Deep Thinker, never could figure out whether masturbation was an image of “the real thing” and Derrida shows how we “privilege” the “real thing” (missionary position sex in a marriage defined as a union between Man and Woman) as healthier against the facts of spousal abuse, divorce, and the other miseries that attend many marriages.

“Normal” sex is defined by the dominant culture as complete self-presence and presence for the Other, who is of the “opposite” sex. It’s questionable how common this is, and early sex researcher Kinsey seems to have found it isn’t.

Like I said, if you came here to find a view about sex that isn’t screwed up as the next man’s, you’ve come to the wrong shop; I am no advice columnist or Agony Aunt. But you should probably dump the bastard, kiddo, and to Lacklove and Manless in Idaho Falls, I say, you can get to Castro street even though there are no direct flights, you only have to change planes in Boise and Seattle.

My country of origin is in mass emotional breakdown. Rove and Bush have reached into their bag of tricks to find a Constitutional amendment, that won’t pass, that defines marriage as a union between a Man and a Woman: or, Vote for Me or You’re a Fucking Homo. A woman speaking Spanish in a beauty parlor was set upon by one of those formidable Irish gals of South Boston, and a mass cat-fight ensued in which several cops, called to separate the clawing tigresses, were injured.

And, as most readers will be aware, the inevitable My Lai has occured in Iraq as if that were a surprise when urban warfare necessarily involves kids, and Moms, and aging uncles in the generalized mayhem.

OK, you want advice. Like Lear, I say, let copulation, of all sorts, thrive. I say, she looked 18 yer honner. I say make love not war. Do it from the ceiling. Just don’t hurt anyone (harder said than done in my experience).

 

 

Stuff

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

HK Spiderman: a protest too far
We at the little red email enjoyed and supported Matt Pearce’s past protests: he even made it to adbust of the week last year. International Action has hopefully made Hong Kong think about some important issues, although some — such as the golf protest — seemed rather less important, if not bordering on the surreal. This weekend, Matt got a 42-week term in jail for his latest protest: against his ex-girlfriend, Jennifer Hollier. According to the trial, he picketed the school at which she worked 12 times during a four and a half month period, demanding an apology for her cheating on him, handing out leaflets and condoms. Jennifer claimed she ended the platonic relationship a year after they went out on a few dates because of his volatile behaviour. In cases of romance gone foul, we tend not to trust either party, so the back story will no doubt remain a mystery. Given Peter Parker’s angst and neuroses, perhaps Spiderman was an appropriate choice of costume.

 

Video The Road to Guantanamo
This is an outstanding docu-drama following the three Brits who got sent to Guantanamo, tortured and kept there for years without trial, only to be eventually realeased without being charged. Their experiences alone testify to why Guantanamo should never have happened.

 

Video Greg Palast: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Greg has been recently praised as the Sid Vicious of investigative reporting. Which is fun, but we reckon no one needs to tape over Palast’s amp dials. He launched a new book this month: Armed Madhouse. In honour of this, we bring you a movie of his last book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, looking at the 2000 election fraud and the Bush family.

 

Video The Curse of Oil Part 1: Rich and Poor
Following on from Rob Newman’s History of Oil, which we put up last issue, we now present the slightly more pin-striped look at oil and its effects on people. The Curse of Oil part one deals with how oil wealth often bypasses the vast majority of people living in oil-rich countries. Part two next week.

 

Video Exposed: The Carlyle Group
This shocking documentary uncovers the subversion of Americas democracy.
Note: The first one minute forty seven seconds of this program is in broadcast in Dutch, The remainder is in English.

 

Thought of the week
Overheard by Lamma’s own answer to Amazon: If Iran had remained a good little US client state, with the Shah staying in power as unelected despot and retaining the world’s worst human rights violations record, they would probably have gone nuclear about 20 years ago, with no outcry at all.

 

Video 9/11 versus Vendetta
A 9/11 “Truth” video, drawing parallels to the comic book turned movie “V for Vendetta” (The first Alan Moore book Hollywood hasn’t got totally wrong).

 

Bin Laden not indictable for 9/11: FBI
This should be headline news: According to the FBI’s most wanted list: “Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world.”
Why no mention of 9-11? According to Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI: “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.” After nearly 5 years, the FBI cannot formally indict and charge him in connection with 9/11, because it has no evidence that would stand up in a court. Yet the US justified the invasion of Afghanistan on the same evidence. Hats off to Ed Haas of the Muckraker Report for this gem. Read on.

 

Video Frontline: The Dark Side
After 9/11, Vice President Richard Cheney seized the initiative. He pushed to expand executive power, transform America’s intelligence agencies and bring the war on terror to Iraq. But first he had to take on George Tenet’s CIA for control over intelligence. Thus goes the blurb for PBS Frontline’s latest documentary: watch it now.

 

Video Trailer Freedom to Fascism
With contributions from Michael Ruppert and many more, this documentary promises to be interesting viewing, with its look at the Federal Reserve, the lack of income tax laws and more, it charts a decline in freedom and rise in coporatism, which is what Mussolini charaterised fascism as being.

 

Adbust Kentucky Fried War
After the avian flu thing turned up, the Colonel shaved and went back to his original occupation: War. Well it might happen. As far as Arjen van Lith of Lithium is concerned it already did.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then why are so many species from warmer climes moving to Antarctica?